Aug 24 Daily Grind :: Books, Then Kindness...VOL. I

We sure do enjoy having our opinions validated, and we light up like a little kid on Christmas morning when someone 'Likes' a something we post on social media. Vice versa, if we don't like something someone says on Twitter, we block them. If someone posts one too many grandiose family snapshots on Facebook, we unfriend them. We live in a world where "unfriending" is an actual thing. Ahh, the good old days when churches just excommunicated people. I guess the modern equivalent to excommunication would be to delete a contact from our smartphone. (Insert audible gasp here.)

If we only converse with like-minded people, imagine the one-sided conversations twenty years from now. As my seven-year-old likes to say, "Boooooorrrrriiiiinnng." Every book we read is a chance to learn from another person. An opportunity to embrace something different; to live another's life if only for a brief moment.

Today's Grind is all about books and acts of kindness. If books lead to understanding, then respect, patience and kindness shouldn't be much farther down the path...right? Here's hoping the art of conversing with those that oppose us isn't on the endangered species list just yet.

Bikers usually get a bad rap. We see them in their leather with their beards and bikes and make all kinds of assumptions. Often, the wrong ones. Our first story on kindness today is about a group of bikers in Allentown, PA who escorted a boy with down syndrome to his first day of school because they were worried he would be bullied.

Here are the 2016 Hugo Award Winners for best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books which were awarded over this past weekend.

A sister can be seen as someone who is both ourselves and very much not ourselves —- a special kind of double.

— Toni Morrison

I didn't even know the Wright Brothers had a sister or that she played a pivotal role in the success of her brothers and the creation of the airplane. Readers can get to know more about Katharine Wright in Author David McCullough's new book "The Wright Brothers".

Korean artist Jungho Lee captures the wonder book lovers feel when opening to that first page. That feeling never goes away even as an adult. His surreal, fairy-tale like paintings make me want to grab a cuppa and a comfy chair and brick thick novel:

I often follow my favorite authors on Twitter so I can get their book recommendations. For example, Stephen King just recommended "Slade House" by David Mitchell via Twitter: "Hard to imagine a more finely wrought and chilling tale of the supernatural. One of the rare great ones."

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